Lars Ulrich on Failing Guitar Hero and Getting Too Old to Rock

Last Friday, a few hours beforeMetallica’s “surprise” concert during Austin’s South by Southwest music festival, I spent 15 minutes interviewing the band’s outspoken drummer, Lars Ulrich. We talked for a bit about the band’s new Guitar Hero game, which actually looks pretty cool, but wound up in an interesting conversation about what aging means for rock ‘n’ rollers (a subject that fascinates me). Instead of editing the result down to a few sound bytes, I’m posting the whole video and transcript (edited slightly for clarity), on the theory that you’ll either be interested in hearing what Lars has to say or you won’t. I was.

Click through to read the transcript.

Michael Hogan: So tell me about Guitar Hero and how this all came about. Is that too broad of a question?

Lars Ulrich: Well just about a year ago, it was in April, a couple guys from Activision showed up at HQ in Northern California—our little hangout up there—and sat down and basically in a nutshell said, “It’s time. We want to do a Guitar Hero game based around Metallica.” And it literally took five seconds: “O.K., great. Let’s do it.” It was one of those. It just seemed so obvious and it seemed like—we’ve done a song for Guitar Hero 3; we’ve done a song for the guys across the street, as they’re lovingly referred to—and the feedback on all fronts was great. And the feedback was the best from my then nine and six-year-old, and obviously using them as a barometer for what’s really going on, this just seemed like the obvious thing to do. And what we loved about the Guitar Hero people was that they were all music fans like we were. They were just incredibly passionate, but there were no suits anywhere. There were no business people anywhere. Even the guys who were running the company weren’t suits or business people; they were all just fans of music and fans of video games and entertainment. It just made us feel really comfortable and at ease because it just seemed to be driven purely by creativity, and the whole business side of it, it was never really a relevant factor in any of the decisions that were going on, you know. So that was really refreshing.

Do you ever think about how important video games are for the music business? Do you care about that?

Well, I mean that’s the type of stuff that you get into when you sit and do interviews with Vanity Fair. Then we can all sit here and talk about how intellectual we are and how cool we can make all this sound. Obviously I’ve done a few interviews about this in the last few months, but it’s not something I think a lot about. To me, as a musician, what’s started to become interesting is how major of a role video games are now playing in music. And how there seems to be this very effortless marriage between the two mediums. And I think that the other interesting thing is if you go back five years—and how much time we all spend in the present trying to predict where things are going in the future—five years ago nobody knew what the fuck Guitar Hero was. And if you’d sat down and said, “Yo, one of the major roles in music in five years from now will be a video game where you hold these plastic guitars and you press buttons,” you’d go, “Duh, who’s going to want to invest in that? Who’s gonna buy into that?” But now it’s such a huge thing and it seems obvious because, it’s the perfect marriage between these two worlds. We put out Death Magnetic through Guitar Hero when it came out six months ago. Great—it’s been a great success, and was such another cool platform or area to put it out in. I think five years from now or ten years from now every major record that comes out is probably going to have a release in a video game format of some kind. And seeing my own kids, who are now 10 and seven, how they are becoming so much more passionate about music and about bands that would never show up on their radar had it not been for the medium.

But what about the playing side of it. Do you think that, if there was Guitar Hero when you were a kid do you think you still would have learned to play as well as you do.

The what-if questions are not my strength. It’s a great question: I don’t know. I don’t know. But my kids—I can tell you what room they’re in; you can go upstairs [and ask them].

Do they play instruments, your kids?

Yeah. My oldest plays clarinet, my youngest plays piano. They dabble in the drums once in a while, but they haven’t embraced that yet. Yeah. But certainly the area where Guitar Hero has really made a difference is their interest in music. They’ll sit down; we’ll play a couple songs or whatever. Then they’ll want to hear in the car on the way to school. Then they’ll want to go online and checkout more songs by this band. It’s sort of like it’s a gateway to a whole other world for them. And I would say in the age of growing up with kids that are now seeming to have a shorter and shorter attention span and with more and more possibilities, anything that is a gateway or that helps spark a passion for anything music related, helps bring that onto their radar in any way, I think is something that should be championed. So right now: Video games as a way for younger kids to experience and be passionate about music, I’m all about that. Absolutely.

Do you play? And what instrument do you play?

I’ve done most of them. I stay away from the singing—you don’t want to experience that.

Does it piss you off it’s not called Drum Hero? Or do we need a Drum Hero?

It might have in my 20s but now I don’t think like that anymore. I’ll play the drums on non-Metallica songs. My problem, of course, is that I play music and play drums mostly by listening to the music. And you have to remind yourself: It’s a video game. So this whole thing about listening to what’s going on—not advisable. You gotta look. You gotta look at these highways, they’re called.. So I’m actually, when I play the Metallica songs, I actually have a handicap, because I play the songs the way I play the songs—they’re my songs I can pretty much play them however I want to. But they’re transcribed in particular way, which are sometimes slightly different than I play them. And I fail. It’s a little dorky, trust me.

I would like to see a videotape of you and a like a 13 year old kid—

—yeah, yeah: The guy in Metallica fails his own song. It’s kind of dorky. So I’ve been going more in the direction the last few months of actually doing more guitar and bass, because it’s not so embarrassing when I fail. And I’m also not—I don’t have my inbuilt habits of how I play. I play guitar and bass more with my eyes, but I play the drums more with my ears.

We’re here for the South by Southwest Festival and there’s something like 2000 bands here and obviously a lot of those band would look at Metallica and say, “Give me some of that.” You guys have all the success, all this respect and credibility over a long period of time.

Thank you.

Is there anything about them that you look at and envy about these guys who are coming here, you know, with 50 cents in their pockets and a guitar on their back or van.

Yeah, they don’t have to fly home tonight and take their kids to soccer practice tomorrow morning at 10 AM. They get to sleep in. And they get to go out tonight and do all kinds of wild and nutty things that we of course used to do in our youth and thankfully have experienced and could write many books about, but choose not to. But they get to go out and live like wild and crazy guys, which of course, once in a while you sort of blissfully sort of throw your mind back to and go, “Oh, just think if I could go out and get all nutty again.” But I’m going to go fly home to San Francisco tonight and take care of domestic and suburban parental responsibilities tomorrow. So I’m not complaining about that. It’s been almost 30 years now, and I lived every single dream that I ever had—so I’m not complaining—but listen, of course going up and playing a show without having to be stretched for 20 minutes would always be desirable. And coming off stage after two hours and not having to be massaged for an hour-and-a-half could also be fun. But, listen I’ve done that and now a 20 minute stretch is part of my pre-show reality and an hour-and-a-half massage is part of post-show reality, and again, I’m not complaining. I’ve lived one and now I’m experiencing the other.

Do you think in 30 years from now it’s still going to be possible to be a huge rock band like you guys are?

That is the $64,000 question. I think it’s probably possible to be a—I don’t know if huge. Okay let’s start one at a time: It’s certainly possible to be a rock band. I don’t know if it’s possible to be a huge rock band. I don’t know if it’s possible to rock band without being completely silly and circus-like, you know, knocking on the door of 70. The physical element, of course, is the big question. I just don’t know. Obviously the guys in their 60s that are playing rock—hats off to them. They’re a great bunch of guys and very inspirational. What I will have to say is, as much as I adore Charlie Watts and respect him, he’s not playing “Damage, Inc.” and “Fight Fire with Fire” and “Battery” every night. And I don’t know if it’s possible for me to play those songs when I’m 65. I don’t know. And the second level of that is, let’s say it is possible to play ’em—just about, like, get through them—if it’s not possible to play ‘em with the same kind of energy and weight and brutality and kind of physical giving it all that we do nowadays—I don’t know if it’s right to play ’em. So you could argue that Charlie Watts—and I’m only using him as an example, I don’t mean it disrespectfully—you could argue that Charlie Watts doesn’t necessarily play the drums very differently at 65 than he did at 25. But, I don’t know if it’s possible for me to play the drums the way I play now at 65, and if I can’t, I don’t know if it’s worth it. It just might be better to not do it.

There’s a youthful anger to Metallica, at least in the beginning. I remember watching “Some Kind of Monster” and there’s that scene where you guys are supposed to do this hokey radio ad and finally you’re just like, “Fuck this.” And it’s almost like everything turned around at that moment you guys captured that feeling of anger against the system but that has to be hard to recapture after a while.

I don’t know. The physical element of it—you get up on stage in front of 20,000 or 50,000, people and it’s hard to deny that. And it’s hard to deny the energy and excitement that comes in that moment. It still gets me pretty much every day and I love it. The hardest thing: When I was growing up, my dad was a professional tennis player and when he turned 45 he went into a different age group. He went into what’s called the Seniors’ Circuit. Literally, at 45 there was a whole different tour for 45 and overs. It was a professional tour called the Grand Masters and he went out and played against other 45-year-olds. I’m 45 now. I’m at that age when my dad started playing on the seniors’ circuit. I’m still playing every night with Lamb of God and Machinehead and all these other bands that are in their 20s and their early 30s. And I have to try and play to that level every night. There’s no seniors’ circuit for rock bands.” So that’s kind of fucked up.

You could become a lounge act in Vegas, right?

And you know what? It may not be far away. I mean, who knows. Or it might get comical. And I just hope that if it gets comical, with an emphasis on embarrassingly comical, that we all have the good fortune to spare everybody, and ourselves, and walk away. And do what a band like Soundgarden did and walk away respectfully at the peak of their career. So listen, who knows what will happen. I’m 45 years old. I think that we still are in our peak, but those massages post-show, they get longer and longer every year.